Thursday, June 9, 2022

Film Review - Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Jurassic World Dominion is the newest entry in the Jurassic franchise and Colin Trevorrow returns to direct this movie after directing the 2015 film Jurassic World but not 2018’s Fallen Kingdom as he was due to make a Star Wars film before being booted off of that project, this time Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard return as Dinosaurs now roam the Earth as they see fit but the company Biosyn led by Campbell Scott is keen to take his genetic experiments further which leads him to the legacy characters from the first Jurassic Park film played by Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum.

 

Jurassic World Dominion is sadly not a great film and the reasons are numerous:

 

- Firstly the storytelling here is horrible, the bulk of the dinosaur moments that you see in this movie save for a small group of others are in the trailers for this movie for they aren’t the focus here as they should be given the premise of them wandering the Earth freely no it’s about fucking giant locusts and Laura Dern’s character Dr Sattler going after them and the entire time this storyline plays out it doesn’t do one bit of interesting entertainment to make it imaginative, exciting or thrilling instead its boring.

 

And also the storyline involving the main characters of the Jurassic World section of the franchise involves cloning now I get that this series hasn’t been afraid to dabble in big Sci-Fi concepts like genetic engineering and the hand of man dabbling in affairs it probably shouldn’t but at least the original film did that in an interesting way whereas here both that and the Locust storyline feel like their in the way of doing something, anything meaningful with oh I don’t know THE FUCKING DINOSAURS WHICH FORM THE LOGO OF THIS VERY FRANCHISE!!!

 

Okay I’ll stop now and move on.

 

- Secondly the cast here really do try their best but in the end it feels like a bit of a waste, Pratt and Howard shine the best and still have good chemistry together as a pair but they often feel like their doing their own individual thing for much of this film and the original actors well Neill comes across the best here and delivers a solid performance but there are times where Dern and Goldblum look as though they would rather be somewhere else and I know they have said on their various social media pages that they were keen to come back but I can’t help but think that after the production was shut down due to the pandemic they lost interest in continuing on and only really did so just to get it over and done with.

 

But the real sin here is the waste of Campbell Scott who is a good actor and in the 1991 Julia Roberts film Dying Young he plays a really good asshole character but here not only does not get to play a fun asshole but he also plays a boring villain and in a lot of his scenes he sounds bored when he’s speaking the dialogue and it feels like a real shame.

 

- And lastly there is a big lack of proper dinosaur and human action and again if you’ve seen the previews for this movie you have more or less seen the bulk of this movie’s Dinosaur moments save for a few extended scenes and another dino scene or 2 here and there but this movie had a gift for its production team handed to them on a plate.

 

Dinosaurs roaming our world freely imagine the wildly imaginative fun you could’ve had in this sandbox, you could’ve done Dino Riders, Dino Bots, Mecha Dinosaurs hell even Truckasaurus or even gone down a Planet of the Apes or Pacific Rim route where Dinosaurs are now the dominant species on Earth and the human race is either a slave to Dinosaurs or devising powerful weapons to fight the Dinosaur armies but alas we got nothing like that and well we got what we got instead.

 

And that all feels very sad in retrospect, I’d like to recommend this movie but I cannot as it’s a big ol Turkey and the more I think about it the more sad I feel given what the possibilities were and how badly they were squandered, 1 out of 5.

 

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